The deep swamp

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Bill and Hillary Clinton are not unlike Lord and Lady Macbeth. For the better part of twenty-five years these two sociopathic liars have tainted everything they touched, going back to Travelgate, Whitewatergate and covering-up Bill’s sexual improprieties. Perhaps the title of Christopher Hitchens’ 1999 opus – No One Left to Lie To – said it best, except that Hillary’s subsequent time as US senator, Obama’s foreign secretary and Democratic presidential candidate has given Team Clinton a whole new generation of Americans to dupe.

Those who agree to serve the power couple’s blind ambition invariably find themselves corrupted. Take, for instance, the Democratic National Committee. After Hillary Clinton’s defeat in the 2008 primaries against Barack Obama, Team Clinton made sure that such a mishap would not be repeated. In August 2015, we are now informed, Hillary Clinton effectively bought the services of the DNC, the very organisation meant to ensure the primaries were on the level. Bernie was burned, but then fair is foul and foul is fair. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, for her part in rigging the primaries in favour of Clinton, had to resign in disgrace as chairperson of the DNC in July 2016. Her interim replacement, Donna Brazile, was later sacked by CNN when WikiLeaks exposed her having emailed Hillary the questions to be used in a town hall debate with Sanders.

Donna Brazile’s confession of guilt, after months of denial, sounded like something straight out of Hillary Clinton’s playbook: ‘The DNC, a political party committee dedicated in part to defending free and fair elections, was attacked by the Russians while the Republican nominee for president openly encouraged it.’ In other words, how come John Podesta’s computer was hacked and not the chairman of Donald Trump’s campaign? Julian Assange, who continues to insist that the source of his pre-election WikiLeaks revelations was not Russian but American, had this to say about the identity of Podesta’s hacker: ‘John, you used “Runner4567” and “p@ssw0rd” as passwords. Are you sure it wasn’t Barron Trump, a blind dog or a plate of lobster risotto?’

In fact, Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, in their insiders’ account of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential bid, Shattered, reveal that she and her closest advisers, including John Podesta, fabricated the Putin-rigged-the-vote-for-his-candidate-Trump fantasy within twenty-four hours of losing the unlosable election. The mainstream media swallowed it hook, line and sinker.

Mark Steyn has quipped that ‘everyone was colluding with the Russians except Trump – Hillary, the DNC, Democratic lawyers, the FBI, all frantically pointing fingers at the only non-colluding guy in the room.’ Certainly, none of the 12 charges brought by Special Counsel Robert Mueller against Paul Manafort and Rick Gates has anything to do with Hillary Clinton’s allegation that Trump teamed up with Russian officials to defeat her in the 2016 election.

Naysayers counter that George Papadopoulos, a low-level member of the Trump campaign, pleaded guilty last month to lying in statements to the FBI about attempting to set up meetings between Donald Trump and Russian operatives. However, no such conflab occurred: had it taken place Obama holdouts in intelligence agencies would have alerted CNN or the Washington Post, as was the case with the abortive discussion between Donald Trump Jnr and Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya.

Adam Schiff, the ranking Democrat in the House Intelligence Committee, asserts that if the Trump campaign colluded with the Russians to win the 2016 election ‘it would also represent one of the most shocking betrayals of democracy in history’ – but this goes both ways. There are many paradoxes about the Mueller enquiry. For example, it has, so far at least, failed to substantiate any of Hillary Clinton’s accusations against Trump. Conversely, it appears to have roused investigative journalists, from Circa magazine to Judicial Watch, to scrutinise Clinton’s past interactions with the Russians.

The Trump-Russia Dossier, on which so much of the collusion-delusion is based, turns out to be not only fabricated but paid for by none other than the Clinton campaign. When this extraordinary information recently surfaced, Hillary Clinton, John Podesta, Robby Mook and Debbie Wasserman Schultz all denied authorising it. Clinton’s original story was that she first learned of the Dossier after it had been published at BuzzFeed on the eve of Trump’s inauguration. Given that the whole enterprise cost a small fortune, Clinton had to accept culpability or be accused of financial ineptitude. In typical Clintonesque fashion, she boldly claimed that she had done nothing wrong in commissioning ‘opposition research’, a project entirely different from what she accuses Donald Trump of doing. She is only partly right. If the Kremlin in any way contributed to the disinformation contained in the Trump-Russia Dossier, then Clinton’s wrongdoing might constitute a conspiracy (which is a crime) rather than collusion (which technically is not).

And then there is the small matter of Uranium One and the sale of 25 per cent of America’s uranium to Russian interests in 2010 while Clinton served as Secretary of State, concomitant with the contribution of some $125 million to the Clinton Foundation by Russian benefactors and half-a-million dollars earned by Bill Clinton for a one-hour presentation in Moscow. The irony, in what Mark Steyn has called a ‘vast wilderness of distorting mirrors’, does not stop there. Journalist Christina Marcos argues that – at the time – domestic intelligences agencies had ‘gathered evidence that Russia nuclear officials engaged in bribery, kickbacks and money laundering to get into the US energy market’, even though the Director of the FBI subsequently signed off on the Uranium One deal. The name of that director was one Robert Mueller.

Mueller, like his successor at the FBI, James Comey, no doubt did not intend to take the low road. The title of Comey’s new book, A Higher Loyalty, would seem to indicate that. If only Emailgate – the missing connection between the Clinton Foundation, Hillary’s stewardship of the Department of State, a secret private server and the spike in Bill’s speaking fees – had not reared its head on Comey’s watch. As it was, he had to make a call on 33,000 subpoenaed emails deliberately deleted; only he made the wrong one, forever compromising himself. Better, surely, for a cop to simply do his duty rather than answer to a higher loyalty, especially if that higher loyalty involves Hillary Rodham Clinton.

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